


wine dark seas and nimble greeds

by sventheolsen



Category: Jessica Jones (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Dreams, F/F, Friends to Lovers, Horror, Lesbian Sex, Like so much angst, Masturbation, Psychological Horror, Recovery, References to Drugs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-19
Updated: 2017-02-19
Packaged: 2018-09-25 14:38:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9824897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sventheolsen/pseuds/sventheolsen
Summary: “If this is about Luke, I get it.” Trish begins gently, years of consoling a rageful metahuman in her belt.Jess huffs out a laugh. “Sure.” she agrees, and tilts the flask in her direction.





	

PART I: Hungry Ham

“And then, that hour the star rose up,  
the clearest, brightest star, that always heralds  
The newborn light of day, the deep sea going ship  
Made landfall on the island… Ithaca, at last.”  
Book XIII, The Odyssey (Fagles, 2nd Ed.)

“Don’t say anything,” she hissed, trying to look dignified with clumps of hay in her hair. Jessica’s shit eating grin spread wider as a resounding click indicates she’s sent it off to Trish’s Snapchat.

“When you said Poughkeepsie,” She teased, pulling the irate blond upwards with her triceps. “ I didn’t think animal husbandry was involved.” 

Trish’s grimace thinned further, as she huffily flicks offending straw from her pants. “Neither did I expect you to tail me,” she snaps, walking forward. But of course, it’s Jessica, and she’s given ten steps before she’s - gently, by her standards - pulled back to face her. “When you said vacation,” Jessica stares at her searchingly, “You didn’t really mean older-white suburbia and farm animals,” 

 

The lie comes immediate. “I’m working on a new story,” she cocks her eyebrow and continues to walk. 

“Right, about autistic cows and illegal Hispanic voters,” Jessica calls too loudly. Trish ignores the stares of residents around her as she hits the streets. She’ll see her for dinner, in the vegan cafe Jess complains of being too pretentious. 

Trish blows air through her teeth, trying to rein in frustration from missing leads over the past three months. After seeking equilibrium in her work and working out a joint custody agreement with Malcolm over Jessica, Trish still can’t shake the itch off her bones. Dorothy’s files - now shredded and scanned on an encrypted disk - keep haunting her in wisps of conversations, between sleep and wake, every single time she stares at Jessica’s eyes. 

Survivor’s guilt, she admitted to her one time, after a long drinking session at her penthouse.   
The demons won’t let either of them go. 

So that’s what’s leading her to an obscure cubicle in Vassar, meeting a professor of cryptography.   
The truth about metahuman powers might pervade Jessica calmly, but Trish cannot feel safe otherwise. 

“The cipher is not conformed to accepted standards,” Professor Flotworth tells her after a long moment. He stares at the eighties-styled document, the typewriter font. He glances up, “Are you sure you’re not government -”

“I’m working jointly with a three letter agency,” Trish cuts off confidently. Flotworth nods furtively.   
“I’m going to keep a singular paper copy with your office, Professor. Let me know if you get anything.”

Jessica notices soon enough, how often her eyes flit towards her phone. The way her jaw loosens in disappointment every time. “You got a boy toy in Poughkeepsie?” She drawls casually, stabbing the “least hippie” dish (pasta) and twirling her fork. 

Trish licks her lips and tries to compose a relaxed face. “Right, it’s about my latest Tinder date.” 

“Whoa, sarcasm is my territory, lady,” Trish is so relaxed, really, that she only notices later that cherry tomato Jessica is popping into her lips is from her own dish. 

Trish lets herself stare, for a second, the way her lips round and her cheeks hollow around the fruit. And glances down. 

“Huh,” Jessica hums, and Trish is so relaxed her eyes are fixed on her meal. 

-

Trish has let herself think sometimes. When she can hear Jess’s gentle snoring next door, and the closest approximation of safety permeates her. 

She’s thought of being pinned against a surface, submitting to strength. To deft fingers cooling her fevered skin, to stroke the side of her hips until - 

Trish lets her fingers trace her mental path, and bites her lips until her fingers buck to a rhythm, building to unravel. The shame that follows afterwards is always worth it. 

Survivor’s guilt, she thinks amusedly. 

-  
She’s working overtime six days in a row and her tech team is done, her station head is very done and she is also personally done, but the alternative would be staring into the Jess shaped hole in her penthouse. 

The headaches begin, in hindisght not unexpectedly. She’s stuck between bracing for a smile and nursing her locked jaw, The latest yuppie musician interviewed is staring at her.

“Great, see you at eleven tomorrow. No OT,” she grits out a promise, fumbling out the doors.

She nearly breaks her steering wheel into two at the snailpace New York traffic, and ignores all texts from the only person she is left caring about in this life.  
.  
Trish can withstand exhaustion and nerve biting anxiety - she cannot handle being treated like a sucker. Her hand tremors like she needs a fix six years ago. She is so on edge she doesn’t notice until third flick her apartment isn’t empty.

“Fuck,” she gasps, eyes glazing over as her fingers automatically stumble to her glock. Grip. Release. Pull - 

“What the hell, Trish,” and her weapon is manhandled away. She sinks to her knees, willing her brain to accept oxygen. “Okay.” Trish rasps as gentle fingers pry away her fists clenched against her chest. 

“Okay,,” she repeats numbly against the side of Jessica’s face. It smells like sinkholes and cheap Whiskey. 

A while later, she’s cocooned into blankets and bullied into some soup and water. 

“There’s something wrong, you know.” Jess murmurs, eyes wide and dark. Trish pauses breathing. “About- about Malcolm,” she shifts, stretching in today’s leather jacket. 

“You know anything about that?” Jess dares to look now, to show her red, red eyes and tear-smudged liner. 

Trish wants. To open her mouth and beckon her closer, her only embodiment of home. To her lies about being safe and trust it’s-going-to-be-okays.

She shakes her head. 

-

The second worst interview of her career happens the next Thursday. She stares at the girl in front of her, not even trying not to transpore Hope Schlottman’s face against hers.   
“It wasn’t his fault,” she says serenely, looking straight at her. “We were drunk - I was out at dark. He was protecting me really, it’s East Harlem.” Her laugh is trilling and gentle.

Trish stares at the lacquered cross glinting against her neck. The producer snaps her out of it . “And that was the Family for Hope foundation,clearing stigma about sexual offenders and victims.” Her mouth rushes with saliva. Hope’s ghost looks at her curiously. 

She vomits onto the floor.

-

Later that evening, Trish finds her, predictably, next to the dumpsters in a dive bar. It’s only when she spots a second beanie wearing hat that the voices become louder.

“Lady, that’s my flask -” Trish stares in disbelief. Jess wrings it out of the young, scruffy man, eyes glinting dangerously.

“Guess what,” she wrings her hands around, cratering the dumpster inadvertently. “Life sucks,” she spits into his face, taking a vengeful swig of the flask. 

“All the fucking time!” She continues, even as the young boy visibly scampers away. “You won’t get a job you like, you won’t get anyone love your sorry ass back,” 

“I thought you’re hot levels of crazy, lady.” He replies, dusting himself at a safe distance.“You’re just fucking crazy.”

“You won’t get jack shit,” she concludes her rant, right about Trish steps into the scene. Jess continues swigging from her stolen flask, ignoring her disapproving stance. “Jess-” she tries.

“No.” She tries again. “No.” 

She sighs, realising she is fighting against a fully grown woman-child. “Get up, and I will choose to forget you tried hooking up with a homeless person.”

Eyes flicked to her, resentfully. “You suck,” she mutters, not budging. Trish glances around, and reckoning her PR team would already hate her for this situation, sits gingerly next to the nest of trash. 

“If this is about Luke, I get it.” Trish begins gently, years of consoling a rageful metahuman in her belt. 

Jess huffs out a laugh. “Sure.” she agrees, and tilts the flask in her direction. 

Trish cannot get the subtext in Jessica’s mind most days, so she accepts the alcohol and calls an Uber forty minutes later. 

-  
“What are you doing this for,” Jessica whispers, bloodstained teeth, her hair loosely wrung around her neck. 

“Suffering without a cause is the worst,” she continues, eyes pitch, pitch black.

“Yes,” Trish finds herself agreeing, and the darkness bleeds out. 

\-   
The initials of the scientific journal swirl into view. Trish presses her fingers against her clammy forehead, presses chapped lips together. 

A year ago, Dorothy Walker dropped a pile of ghosts into her lap, and Trish could not help becoming haunted. For whose cause, her subconscious cants back at her.

She pads out to her kitchenette, ignoring the way the silence resounds. Jess is out of town, chasing some teen offender- “I don’t do bailsbondpersoning,” she drolly quipped that breakfast. “But he seems extra dicky, so I had to try.”

“No, you don’t,” she mutters back to herself. Maybe some Krav Mega would do it.

-

Jessica spent the first five days after - they struggle to call it anything besides the Dock incident - dead asleep and to the world, rejecting all calls and zealously protected by Malcolm.

“She’s not doing well,” Malcolm admits to her on day six, and Trish takes off from work early for the first time in six months that day. 

She finds Jessica curled out the fire escape, content to be in two places at once. She’s staring at an apartment Trish can’t figure out. 

“Here,” she passes the greasy sandwich to her. Jessica wordlessly turns into her and lets Trish stroke her hair and trace her back.

Day Seven, they make it past the apartment to the bodega across. “Fucking hipsters,” Jessica mutters at the foreclosure sign posted up front. It’s the only viable pass at conversation Jessica has given in six hours. 

Trish raises her eyebrows. “Maybe you should tackle the millennial invasion next,” she quips, stealing the fries her friend neglects consistently. A glint lights up her eyes afterwards, and Trish endures a colorfully phrased rant about artisanal products and which body parts to shove them to. “They do just make up the majority of my ad revenue,” Trish reminds lightly, Jessica scowls and pays the bill.

Day eight night, Trish is unpacking the vacuum cleaner she delivered to the apartment, scribbling a note to Malcolm to borrow whenever. Jess slouches against her window, “You’re going to work,” it’s a statement, and she already saw her alarm set to five am.

Trish tightens her jaw.

It’s not like she had spent the most restful sleep cycles - before and after the Dock Incident - next to Jess, her curled up frame reflecting jaundiced city lights, neon red and blue. Not that Trish found her breathing therapeutic, that she could at last lie in bed with someone and not feel afraid. 

“Yes,” she grits out instead. Jess stares at her. Trish is becoming more aware of this, how Jess’ gaze follows her across a room, how her face changes with each lilt of Trish’s voice. She feels her own mouth going dry.

“Come with me,” she doesn’t say. “Let’s go far away together and get lost because you are only home I have -” 

Those non-words choke in her throat, and she cowardly pushes away and resumes packing. 

 

When Jess was fifteen and Trish was sixteen, two scared little girls trapped in circumstances that only time would release - Jess had made a promise.

Trish knew, even then, as Patsy, that promises are as brittle as bones, that thie only promise worth listening are as sure as breathing. 

“You will be safe,” Jess promises her, emo-eyes and gaunt, ghoulish frame, too much love contained in such a soft voice.

Patsy, sweating and dreaming about demons on her third detox attempt - she breathed it in. Breath to breath. Lip to lip. 

=   
Was it day or night right now? Trish couldn’t tell.

The curtains have been drawn in too long, and her voice is hoarse from not speaking in so long, her practised lilts have probably become rusty. 

Trish is glad she had invested in (what she now calls) Simpson-proof security, because she can’t depend on her body to put someone on a deadlock now. There’s not much point, stepping out of the house then - because who will protect her then?

Jessica is gone, she thinks. Funny how her response to hard truths have always been - dig deeper, dig deeper. Jess throws it at her face and runs away.

She hears voices, alright, like a proper mad person. Voices that sound like Malcolm or .- on a particularly amusing time - her tech intern, of all things. Begging her to open up.

She won’t, of course. She knows what happened last time. 

The spread between night and day grows closer and so do sleep and non-stileep, Trish floats between space and time. She remembers feeling like this, entering TV shoots on autopilot, high on ecstasy out of her mind.

All’s well, she thinks, that she didn’t even need a drug beyond sleep deprivation. 

 

Voices. 

Fuck them, she thinks.

Jessica is beside her, pupils blown black, as high as the rest of Trish. 

“Without a cause to suffer for,” she whispers and Trish wishes everything to splinter whole.   
-  
It’s breath to breath again, that keeps her alive.

Two quick, desperate huffs against her lips - “Dammit, Trish, please- please.” and she is gasping into the sunlight, into the broken gleam of Jessica’s eyes, forever her eyes.

She is too grateful and foolish so she presses her lips again, in that promise. Breath to breath, intermingling with - is that noise? 

Are those tears? Trish can’t tell anymore, she can’t feel anything beyond the life anchor of Jessica’s mouth pressed against her palm, her neck, the juncture between her breasts. 

She is gasping, again, she knows how to breath now. Jess enters her without ceremony, fingers twirling into her centre and she is etching half moons on to her back.

They could do this, Trish thinks with some finite irony, they could blur within the thin blood barriers of their skins and become one, finally, safe, finally whole -

Jessica cocks her fingers once, twice, and Trish is brought crashing down to reality. 

 

 

 

“It’s wrong, Telemachus, wrong to rove so far  
So long from home - clouds in your palace so brazen  
they’ll carve up all your wealth, devour it all  
And then your journey here will come to nothing.”  
The Prince Sets Sail, Odysseus,


End file.
